Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/55

 sky, and save for the reverberant, thumping sound, silent, as if the unnatural thunder had frightened the very animals to take cover, to listening with hair and ears bristling. Fascinated by the sound, Philip rose and walked out into the enclosure; he wore, in the hut, only a cloth wrapped about his waist, and standing there beside the dying fire he looked and felt a part of all that untamed wild. He was not a big man, but a singularly well-built one, with muscles hard yet supple—a man such as his father must have been when he aroused such turbulent emotions in a breast so chaste as that of Emma Downes.

Listening to the unearthly sound, Philip extended his arms, watching the muscles flex beneath the tanned smooth skin, and suddenly there swept over him a vivid and poignant sense of delight in being alive. He felt the warm life sweeping through him and a sudden fierce pride in a body of which he had never before been conscious. He had a wild desire to leap the flimsy barricade and running, running in the light of the stars, to lose himself in the sable shadows of the forest.

He thought, "I am alive! I am alive!"

He was aware of the things that exist only in the night, of the demons worshiped by the witch-doctor of Megambo, of unearthly creatures that hovered in the shadows of the forest. The scene by the lake returned to him. . . the procession of virgins pouring the fertile waters of the lake over the belly of a repulsive idol.

He thought, "We are bewitched—Swanson and Naomi and I. We will die prisoners without ever having broken the spell." 